This was only Pauline Dujancourt’s second runway show, but she has already built an impressively realized world around her brand. First, there’s the French-born, London-based designer’s backstory: having learned to knit from her grandmother as a child, she picked her needles back up during the pandemic and undertook a knitwear MA at Central Saint Martins, which led to Dover Street Market snapping up her spring 2024 collection and a short-listing for the LVMH Prize. (It was this that prompted her to give up her side hustle consulting on knits for the likes of Simone Rocha and Molly Goddard and devote herself to her own brand full-time.) Second, there are her powerful instincts as a storyteller: Previous collections have taken their cues from traditions as wide-ranging as the votive tablets found at Shinto shrines in Japan to the flower of a plant passed down to her family from that very same grandmother—but all folded into a graceful and lightly Gothic aesthetic universe that feels distinctly Dujancourt.
Her ability to spin a yarn—in every sense of the term—was plenty visible at tonight’s show on the Strand. As attendees filed into a dark, cavernous basement, knitted brooches in the shape of birds were handed out; scattered around the seats were towering rows of dried crop stalks, to eerie effect. The first look out, to a soundtrack of rippling synth arpeggios, was a dress painstakingly crafted from delicate strips of lace, tulle, and featherlight knits, floating in the spectral wake of the model’s click-clacking white pumps and knee-high lace hosiery. There was a deliberate narrative arc to how the looks unfolded from there. Cycling between white and black at first, the outfits were inspired respectively by Dujancourt’s mother’s wedding dress and traditional mourning garb. Next, splashes of blue began to emerge, first through a handful of deep navy gowns; then a punchy royal blue cropped up across clutch handbags and skirts, before saturating a series of swirling, sculptural gowns. It was a brilliant showcase of Dujancourt’s ability to transform knitwear into something almost impossibly light and ethereal.
This time around, Dujancourt also took cues from a more literal form of storytelling: the theater, and more specifically, the character of Nina in Chekhov’s The Seagull, the play’s doomed but formidable heroine. (Dujancourt played the character while studying theater in Paris many moons ago.) To wit, there was a recurring motif of feathers, whether subtly embedded in the fluttering strips of fabric sewn into coats or woven across dresses in a diagonal pattern inspired by a pair of knit archetypes Dujancourt admitted she’s previously been “repelled by”: argyle sweaters and crochet “granny squares.” In Dujancourt’s hands, though, these heavy sartorial tropes became delicate, even sensual. “It’s revealing, but it’s never too sexy,” she said. “I don’t want to speak for every woman, but I’m definitely more interested in sensuality rather than sexiness. That’s really important to me.”
Yet even with the technical know-how that underpinned each garment, what felt most striking about Dujancourt’s work this season was its soulfulness. It turned out those crochet birds showgoers were pinning to their outfits weren’t just a lovely gesture to welcome them into her world, but a tribute to a friend of Dujancourt’s who passed away during the process of her making the collection. Along with the show notes was a poetic extract from Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close that chronicles the narrator’s longing for a lost friend or lover to return, as the natural world continues to cycle around them—a powerful, evocative expression of grief that Dujancourt’s collection artfully matched. “It takes up my whole life to run this brand, and it’s a choice, but I love it,” she said. “Even though I was grieving, I couldn’t stop: I had a collection to deliver. It’s a different sort of life, and it can be tough. So I wanted to explore that contrast between the beauty and the ugliness of it all.” Dujancourt may have a well-earned reputation as London’s preeminent knitwear wiz, but she also proved that her technically complex designs can carry a powerful—even profound—depth.
